Bombs went off in Boston

Boston, its police, its people - did well to bring this to an end so quickly. The London marathon runners have been talking about having a whip round for Boston. Most of these runners are not athletes, but are good hearted people raising money for good causes. They are not politicians. They are not acceptable targets - not that any should be considered as such - it was wrong to blow up a Brighton hotel all those years ago too.
Boston must have breathed a great big sigh of relief now that it is over.
Hope no-one from TFP was adversely affected by it all.
Borla - I think many would have been happier if they had been Arabs - or even Koreans.

 

What they mean is that aren't white American rednecks with guns and bibles.

 

so there were two explosions---one by the finish line of the marathon that took a few seconds to unfold, and another, much longer explosion of idiocy. this has been a very depressing week in the american media-scape. very so. idiots, often racist idiots, interpreting factoids based on almost nothing. on the flipside, there was the practice of understaffed news agencies running around looking for things: the culmination of this surreal kind of "journalism" seemed to me the rush toward the father of the two suspects in russia.
how do you feel?
my son is dead. get away from me.

it's bizarre to me, even after thursday night's events, that the entire fucking city of boston would be placed in a state of emergency so that the very military police could hunt down a 19 year old kid. how was that even possible? was there an official state of emergency? maybe such a declaration is unnecessary when the events combine with adequately idiotic coverage to generate near-universal consent for militarized police actions. terror does that. just turns out there were two motors of it.

that said, i'm pleased that the logic of the situation did not play out entirely and that this kid wasn't reduced to a bullet-riddled pulp. it is good that the wheels of the legal system may actually turn, so that this militarized insanity gets looped back toward police work and away from the logic of war.

beneath the plastic surface of the media-scape, tho, people reacted in a very fucked up situation to help each other. it's the way people seem to really be, tending toward co-operation and not at all the individualist assholes you'd think they were if you had the misfortune or bad taste to take the dominant american mythologies seriously. my friend dr. dave, for example:

At the scene: Essex doctor treats injured at finish line - Gloucester, MA - Wicked Local Gloucester

lest you imagine that moving into the media-sphere excludes compassion and even admiration for what people did and how they reacted in a traumatic situation.

the past 24 hours in boston were the first real display of the new normal, the one established via the logic of "terror" since 2001 to the very considerable profits of corporate entities in the "Security" sector.

i hope you enjoyed the show.

 

I will admit I have not read everything in this thread, so if what I say is behind the conversation please forgive me.

I am glad they caught the "Suspects" however, we only see them as suspects because of what we have been told. I am not trying to look for a conspiracy here, but through everything, I am a bit skeptical, till I see more. I see how things have worked in my small town as far as justice, and find that what is on the surface isn't always what really happened. I hope that since one of them is alive that maybe we will be able to learn more of what this is really about.

I will also say it is a bit scary how they pulled these two out of a crowd. I know from being on the sidelines of races not anywhere near the size of this marathon, how many cameras are going, so they can capture every moment of the race, and possibly sell pictures and video to the participants. I also am a video editor, so I know what its like to have mountains of footage to sift through, again not anywhere near the scale here, but for them to be able to pick two people out of such a huge crowd and all the footage available to me is overwhelming.

 

I see reactions of friends on Facebook, and I'm appalled by many peoples' reactions even though I understand why they might react that way. I feel like I'm in the middle of an angry mob and I don't know whether I should just keep my mouth shut or explain that no, I don't want a pitchfork.

There's at least one picture of Jahar dropping the backpack with the bomb in it immediately before the explosion and the brothers threw an identical pressure cooker bomb as the police were chasing them. It's all but impossible that they are not the bombers.

 

I realize how they found the people with the facial recognition software and all, it was more about the ablity to have that big of a mountain of footage with that many people, and the ability to sift through it all and come up with them.

I have not heard or seen that. I am not arguing it or calling it wrong. I just need to see it for myself.

 

A couple of things - I don't see how the "shelter in place" order was any different than what is given during a snowstorm or other weather event. There was a clear danger to civilian life, and the authorities acted in a similar manner.

The big break in the case seems to be when they were ID'd by one of the victims who saw them drop the backpack.

 

is there video of him without the bag after?

 

it's not obvious to me that the break came from the facial recognition software itself or from the decision to release the photos publicly. it seems to me that the latter is what prompted these two to jack a 7-11 in cambridge, shoot an mit cop, carjack a benzo, etc...i am not sure it would have been easy to identify the suspects as individuals even as it was good for determining that they were the primary suspects. what mystifies me, really, is that these two decided to jack the 7-11. they could just as easily have disappeared. but there are many ways to commit suicide, i suppose.

 

I think during the process of becoming radicalized, a certain sort of self-mythology is written along the way. I mean, I don't know anything about these guys, I'm no longer following the news, but there is a fairly established tradition of martyrdom that tends to go along with these sorts of things. Blaze of glory thinking. If I try to imagine what it felt like after the fact, I mean, the preparation and the act itself was probably very purposeful and fulfilling, but once it's done there could be such a rapid deflation where all sorts of less gratifying feelings take over. Perhaps after having done such a thing, one's own imminent destruction seems sort of inevitable...and just running off and starting over somewhere else seems impossible from that place. Regardless, this seems to be the way more often than not.

 

They didn't rob the 7/11. They were there when someone else robbed it. At least according to the reports I've read.

 

The morning when this was going on (Thurs), they were interviewing someone who lived in the area where the confrontation happened. They kept looping eyewitness video of the police putting a totally nude man in the back of a cop car. He didn't appear to be injured. Anyone have an idea of who that guy was?

 

He was ordered to strip by the police, detained and eventually released. I believe that they ordered him to strip because of the fear that the remaining bomber had a suicide vest or similar explosive device. Remember, they threw at least 5 bombs at the police during the firefight, and this guy was detained after that.

I'm not quite sure if that will count as a reasonable response to the circumstances, but it could go either way. The police clearly were justified in feeling threatened, but this seems a little over the top.

What I think is worse is that several Senators are justifying the lack of legal representation of the accused bomber by calling him an "enemy combatant" when he's an American citizen. He's clearly not an enemy combatant any more than David Koresh or Bill Ayers was.

 

this is all I can find about it. on the npr website. who the hell is this guy?

'The Hunt Is Over:' Police Apprehend Marathon Bombing Suspect : The Two-Way : NPR


View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQQ2v2iQCEg
--- merged: Apr 20, 2013 9:23 PM ---

But who was he?